What the anti-seed oil movement gets wrong — and right | STAT

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OpinionFirst Opinion

The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

As a clinical dietitian who works with cardiac patients, here’s what I want people to know

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Vegetable oil isn’t the problem. The food product often surrounding the oil is, the writer contends.Adobe

By Cole Hanson<br>May 22, 2026

Hanson is a registered dietitian and clinical inpatient dietitian in Minneapolis.

She came in wanting to do right by her husband.

He’d been losing weight — the kind of weight loss that says something’s wrong — and she’d spent weeks trying to reverse it. Cream in his coffee, butter in his soups, all the gristle he could handle. She’d read somewhere that fat was the most calorie-dense food she could give him, and she was right.<br>Advertisement

She’d also read that seed oils were toxic, that the real enemy was vegetable oil, that we were supposed to be eating traditional animal fats all along.

By the time she was admitted herself — heart procedure, blood pressure that had been climbing for months, both of them now taking turns as patients — she told me she suspected the diet hadn’t helped. In the quiet space between us, there wasn’t room left to argue.

This is happening constantly now, and it’s only going to accelerate.<br>Advertisement

Related Story

Using oil, seed oils included, instead of butter lowered risk of premature death, says study

The seed oil panic has achieved full institutional legitimacy. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called canola, corn, soybean, sunflower, cottonseed, and grapeseed oils the most unhealthy aspect of the American diet. The January 2026 dietary guidelines — which discarded 421 pages of scientific recommendations from the advisory committee — now list butter and beef tallow alongside olive oil as acceptable cooking fats. Then came the food companies: Steak ’n Shake “RFK’d” its fries, PepsiCo announced it would phase canola and soybean oils out of Lay’s and Tostitos, with Kraft Heinz, General Mills, and Nestlé following with their own reformulation pledges. The food industry is responding, at great speed, to a story that is running well ahead of the evidence.

As a clinical dietitian who works with cardiac patients every day, I want to offer something the panic doesn’t have: something slower and less influencer friendly. Let’s talk about what the evidence actually shows.

First, “seed oils” is a marketing term, not a nutritional category. What we’re actually talking about are vegetable oils high in polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats — the kinds of fats that, in decades of research, are associated with lower rates of cardiovascular disease when they replace saturated fat in the diet. A 2020 Cochrane meta-analysis of roughly 59,000 participants across 15 randomized controlled trials found that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat reduced combined cardiovascular events by 21%. Cardiologists note that the risk reduction from this dietary substitution is comparable to the benefits of statin medications. We don’t make a habit of telling statin patients to stop their medication because of something they heard on a podcast.

The core claim of the seed oil panic is that linoleic acid — an omega-6 fatty acid in these oils — drives systemic inflammation, which drives chronic disease. It sounds plausible. But “sounds plausible” and “is demonstrated in humans at dietary exposure levels” are different things. Randomized controlled trial evidence does not support this claim.<br>Advertisement

There’s a secondary argument about oxidation — seed oils go rancid at high heat, producing potentially harmful compounds. This idea is chemically real and worth being thoughtful about (don’t reuse frying oil repeatedly). But the evidence that oxidation at home-cooking levels causes measurable harm in humans isn’t there.

Some of what’s driving the seed oil panic...